Comments

April 2020 Domain Industry Report

Starting this month, we are beginning to publish a monthly domain industry report. This report includes monthly top keywords, top extensions, top countries, top registrars and more.

The last two months were interesting times for all over the world. The coronavirus pandemic has become one of the biggest global crises we see. Nevertheless, the domain industry seems not much affected by looking at the number of domain registrations and sales in comparison to the previous months.

In April 2020, more than 5.16 million domain names were registered. .COM was the top domain extension with 3.28 million domain names (64%). According to our records, 97 of the domain names registered in April 2020 have become in Alexa Top 1 Million List.

The number of domain registrations in March 2020 was almost the same with April 2020: 5.18 million.

Top Keywords of Domain Registrations

KEYWORD

DOMAIN COUNT

online

36,643

shop

33,112

home

29,312

covid

25,365

life

23,815

group

19,366

health

18,132

store

17,737

tech

16,526

news

15,347

The top 10 keywords of domain names registered in April 2020 are online, shop, home, covid, life, group, health, store, tech and news.

The top keywords are similar to previous month (March 2020) and 7 of them are common. In March 2020; yule and corona were in the top keywords list but this month they are not. Yule is not even in the top 100 list.

The keyword “covid” has been appearing in the monthly top ten keywords list every month since February 2020. Also covid the only keyword that is not included in the all-time top keywords list. Seven of the top 10 keywords of April 2020 are also included in the top 10 keywords of all-time domain registrations. Store and news are not included in the top 10 but they are in the top 50 keywords list of all-time.

Because of the pandemic, keywords related to corona and health are trending such as medical, care, mask, fitness, etc. The popularity of these keywords on domain registrations is showing itself on Google Trends, too.

*We exclude the stopwords such as the, and, my, of, for, in, to, etc, from the list in all our domain industry reports.

Top Extensions

EXTENSION

DOMAIN COUNT

com

3,284,464

xyz

242,545

net

230,276

org

182,247

online

120,119

info

97,520

site

78,800

icu

63,597

top

62,450

buzz

61,857

.COM is by far the most popular domain extension in April 2020, as always. 64% of registered domain names in April 2020 were .COM. That means every day more than 110 thousand .com domain names were registered.

The only different extension between March 2020 and April 2020 list is .buzz extension. Club extension was at the 10th place in March, and became 11th in April.

All the new generic top-level domains in the top list have registration promos at almost all registrars. Some of these extensions are offered free or as low as $0.99 for the first year.

The top 10 extensions of domain names registered in April 2020 also exist in the top extensions of all registered domains, except the .buzz extension.

.BIZ extension is at the 10th place on all-time top extensions but was 25th extension in April.

Top Countries

COUNTRY

DOMAIN COUNT

USA

1,475,868

China

437,281

Canada

342,240

Japan

292,498

Great Britain

91,174

India

88,695

Russia

78,042

France

59,799

Germany

59,661

Spain

49,170

The USA is the top county of domain registrations like other months. All of the countries in April 2020’s list are also in the all-times top countries list except Russia. Russia is the 14th country in the all-times list but has been appearing in the monthly lists in the last several months.

The domain registrations for each country on the list increased by 10% in comparison to the previous month. Only the domain registrations from China decreased by about 40% in April 2020. Also, Hong Kong was in the top 10 list in March but is 21st place in April.

Turkey, Netherlands, and Austria are the other countries with more than 30 thousand domain registrations.

* We used the registrant country data of Whois records in the top countries analysis.

** A few of the popular whois privacy services use addresses in Panama so we excluded Paname from the list.

Top Domain Registrars

REGISTRAR

DOMAIN COUNT

GoDaddy

1,225,712

Namecheap

471,268

GMO

272,536

Tucows

256,660

Google

246,753

PDR

184,176

Alibaba

162,061

Namesilo

133,109

Wix

114,424

West263

99,795

1.2 million domain names, 23.8% of registered domain names in April 2020, were registered at GoDaddy. 61.4% of domain names were registered at the top 10 registrars, above.

The fact that Wix, as a website builder, finds a place in the list indicates that the domain names registered there will be used as websites. That means that more people or small companies have started doing online business during the pandemic.

Expiry Date Statistics

EXPIRY DATE

DOMAIN COUNT

RATE

2021

4,748,052

92.08%

2022

288,973

5.60%

2023

61,949

1.20%

2024

2,737

0.05%

2025

38,533

0.75%

2026

784

0.02%

2027

225

0.00%

2028

129

0.00%

2029

184

0.00%

2030

14,638

0.28%

More than 92% of the registered domain names in April 2020 are registered for 1 year. This is not something surprising. The interesting thing is that 5-years registrations and 10-years registrations are high in comparison to other multiple year registrations. This statistic was almost the same in the previous month.

EXTENSION

1-YEAR REGISTRATION RATE

ALL

92.08%

com

90.0%

xyz

98.8%

net

91.7%

org

89.6%

online

96.9%

info

95.3%

site

98.5%

icu

99.9%

top

96.9%

buzz

99.9%

10% of the registration of COM, NET, and ORG extensions are made for more than 1 year. For .info, this rate is about 5%, but if we look at the new generic top-level domains, we see that %97 to %100 of the registrations are made for one year.

We, statistically, know that more than 50% of the 1-year registered domain names won’t be renewed next year and will be deleted. This deletion rate is higher on the new gTLDs.

Top Domain Sales

In April 2020, there were 11 domain sales above $50,000 and 102 domain sales above $10,000. The 9 of the sales above $50,000 are .com and others are .de and .cc. The $51,000 787.cc sale is the 3rd most expensive .cc domain sales ever.

There were 21 domain sales above $50,000 and 96 domain sales above $10,000 in March 2020.

What Domain Industry Was Talking About Last Month?

ICANN rejected .org sale to a private equity company: ICANN decided to withhold consent on the controversial sale of the .org registry PIR to private equity company Ethos Capital. The $1.135 billion deal was delayed by ICANN before. Parties involved in the deal released statements to announce their disappointments after the decision.

GoDaddy, the largest domain registrar in the world, will make all Whois records private with no cost for customers. Most of the top registrars are already providing Whois privacy service for free for years.

.DE registrations hit 16.3 million at the end of 2019. 15 million of them registered to people and companies in Germany.

GoDaddy acquiredNeustar, the registry of .biz and .us domain extensions.

We will continue to publish monthly domain industry reports next month. (Note: All the data in this report was taken from Dofo. We didn’t include the country code domains in this analysis because of the lack of accuracy.)

Latest Posts

.XYZ, the seventh most registered generic domain extension (gTLD), is one of the first new gTLDs and now has more than 3.5 million registered domain names.
The Story of .XYZ
.XYZ was officially delegated by ICANN as part of the new gTLD ...

.com is the most popular and valuable extension on the Internet. Every day, tens of .com domains sell for thousands of dollars. 2-letter .com domain names have a higher value than any .com domain and are popular because they are short and easily mem...

.TOP, the sixth most registered generic domain extension (gTLD), is one of the first new gTLDs and now has more than 3.7 million registered domain names.
The Story of .TOP
.top was officially delegated by ICANN as part of the new gTLD pr...

If you ever check Whois records of a domain name to find out what’s its current status, you should have seen the domain status codes. These codes are generally not that easy-to-understand. That’s why we think it’s a good idea to publish a blog...

.ICU, the generic domain extension (gTLD), was approved by ICANN in ICANN's New gTLD Program. ShortDot SA, based in Luxembourg is the registry of the .ICU. The extension stands for “I See You”.
The Story of .ICU
ICANN opened the new gT...

We are continuing the weekly interview series with a domain industry veteran: Bill Sweetman. Bill is the founder of Name Ninja, a domain brokerage and consultancy company. It was a very entertaining and informative interview for us. Thanks to Bill f...